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  The Inca world was ruled by spirits and superstition. Every village was surrounded by secret places – trees, rocks, springs and caves – that had a magical significance. The Incas collected unusual objects, and in every house there were canopas, or household deities, displayed in a niche in a corner or stowed in a special place, wrapped in cloths. They observed rituals throughout their daily lives, sprinkling chicha or coca when ploughing, saying prayers and incantations when crossing rivers, making sacrifices on particular occasions and always leaving an object on the pile of stones that is still often to be found at the top of every pass.

  The Incas lived in fear of the sorcerers, the old men who foretold the future by studying the shape of ears of corn, the entrails of animals or the movement of the clouds, and were terrified of the magic spells they cast to cause love or grief in their victims. But they also revered them, for many of the sorcerers were medicine men as well as magicians. In some parts of Peru they would undertake trepanning, cutting open the skull to let out evil spirits and to offer the patient some relief from pain or swelling. The rich Quechua language shows that the Incas had a fine knowledge of anatomy and medicine, with words such as hicsa for abdomen, cunca oncoy for angina, susuncay for putting to sleep, siqui tullu for coccyx, husputay for haemorrhage, hanqqu for nerve and rupphapacuy for fever.

  They amassed a great store of knowledge about local plants and how to use them to treat different ailments, and were particularly expert on poisons and plants with hallucinogenic qualities – every man would carry upon him a little packet of coca leaves for chewing on. They also used the trumpet-shaped Solanaceae, or datura as it is better known, in magic spells to cast their enemies into a trance, sarsaparilla as a diuretic, tembladera (Equisetum bogotense) against pyorrhoea, a plant they called llaquellaque (Rumex cuneifolius) as a purgative of the blood, ortiga (Urtica magellanica) to cure sciatica, and payco (Chenopodium ambrosoides) against worms.

  The two volumes of El Libro de Viáticos y Almacén show just how elaborately Brother Salumbrino and his fellow Jesuit priests would prepare for a trip out of the city. Every traveller would be issued with a mule for riding on, and another for carrying their supplies. Many of the mules’ names survive in the records: La Cabezuda, La Caminante, La Mulata, El Galán. The supplies would include hay for the mules, for the desert of northern Peru in particular was short of fodder, and often of water too. The traveller would also be equipped with a bowl, a spoon for the table and a knife for cutting meat, a bedroll and a sheet, a roll of sealing wax, spices in the form of saffron, pepper and cinnamon, wine, a sombrero, a soutane and a cape to keep out the cold in the mountains. The grandest inventories included travelling altars, supplies of wine and wheat hosts for offering communion, and even silver candlesticks. But, grand or simple, each traveller’s list concludes with patacones, fried plantain chips, for an Indian guide, and more patacones for el gasto del camino, the road toll.

  Despite the rips in the pages of these ancient books, they still summon, nearly three centuries on, a pervasive and enormously fierce sense of just how energetic and enterprising the Jesuits were. On 26 April 1628, the earliest entry in the book that mentions Brother Salumbrino, the pharmacist sent the Jesuit college at Arequipa, at least three weeks’ ride south of Lima, not far from Lake Titicaca, four cases of drugs, including eight libras of caña fistula. The following month he sent the college another eight libras of caña fistula and a copy of the Meditations of St Ignatius Loyola. In August of that same year he despatched supplies of tobacco and cocoa and another three boxes of caña fistula, and the following April the mule load to Arequipa would include four bottles with different drugs ‘sent by Brother Agustín’.

  San Pablo was making a name for itself as a trading post, and it was not confined to medicines. It imported textiles from England, Spain, France and the Low Countries, Italy and the Philippines, and large quantities of black taffeta from China. It provided Jesuit schools in the region with ink and paper imported from Italy—in 1629 San Pablo despatched three thousand pens in a single huge shipment that went to the Jesuit College in Santiago, Chile. Farm tools such as ploughs, sickles and hoes were in great demand. San Pablo shipped those off too, along with saddles and harnesses, tallow candles and pottery, shoes and clothing for children as well as adults, needles and nails. In 1628 the college sent twelve baras of tailors’ needles from France to Arequipa, while three years later another two thousand needles, described as finas de Sevilla, were needed. Between 1628 and 1629 San Pablo also sent twelve thousand nails to Potosí, ten thousand to Arequipa, and more than twenty thousand to Chile.

  As this trade blossomed, Brother Salumbrino’s influence also soon extended beyond the walls of the college. Like the library at San Pablo, which ordered books from Europe and sent them out to colleges all over the viceroyalty, the pharmacy became an early distribution centre of medicines and medical information for other Jesuit institutions in the area. Salumbrino supplied medicines to the Jesuits who left San Pablo on long missions among the Indians in the Andes, and to other Jesuit outposts

  The Libro de la Botíca neatly lists everything that San Pablo supplied to the other Jesuit colleges in the viceroyalty: agua fuerte and aguardiente, powdered mother of pearl, pine resins, black and white balsam, bezoar stone, nicotiana in powder, caña fistula, cinnamon, nutmeg, sal volatile – the original smelling salts – mercurio dulce or mercury sulphide for treating syphilis, black pepper, ambergris, senna, tamarind, sugar, camphor, sweet and bitter almonds, almond oil, tobacco from Seville, essence of roses and violets, rhubarb, chocolate and, of course, cinchona bark, that would eventually be despatched, dried in strips or in powder, in huge quantities all over the continent and also across the Atlantic.

  From the earliest years the Jesuits of San Pablo were of the clear belief that conversion of the Indians would come about not by force, but by education and persuasion. For that reason they were quick to send young priests out into the field. Many of the young Jesuits who were posted to Peru made it a priority to learn Quechua and the other Indian languages, and to accustom themselves to the Indians’ way of life.

  The Jesuits in the field, especially those who had been sent north-east of Lima, to Loxa in the Andes, began to persuade the local Indians to seek out the árbol de las calenturas, the ‘tree of barks’, as Bernabé Cobó, another Jesuit and a colleague of Salumbrino’s, would describe cinchona in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo in 1639. They taught them how to cut off the bark in vertical strips so as not to kill the tree, and to plant five new trees for every one they cut down. The Jesuits would place the saplings in the ground in the shape of a cross, in the belief that God would then help them grow better. More than two centuries later, an English plant-hunter and bark-trader would observe: ‘Always when passing [these plantations] my Indians would go down on their knees, hat in hand, cross themselves, [and] say a prayer for the souls of the Buenos padres.’

  After they stripped off the bark, the cascarilleros or barkhunters would cut it into pieces and leave it to dry in the sun. Taking care not to break the fragile, powdery strips, they would wrap them carefully in pieces of cloth and then in watertight leather packs for transporting down the hills by mule to Lima.

  San Pablo began to distribute cinchona bark – or cascarilla as it was known in Spanish – to the other Jesuit colleges in the viceroyalty, and even as far as Panama and Chile. Eventually Brother Salumbrino also began sending supplies of cinchona to Europe.

  The first person listed in the Libro de Viáticos y Almacén as leaving San Pablo with a quantity of cinchona bound for Europe is a Father Alonso Messia Venegás, an elderly Jesuit priest who carried a small supply of it in his bags when he travelled to Rome in 1631. Father Alonso knew, as every Jesuit did, how malarious the Holy City was, and had heard accounts of the terrible conclave of 1623 when so many of the visiting cardinals died. Rome was in dire need of a cure for the fevers, and Brother Salumbrino was eager to see if the plant that stopped people from shivering could be put to
use curing the chills that were a symptom of the marsh fever. Little did he know that not only did it stop the shivering, it could also be used to treat the disease.

  The physicians in Rome found that the bark was indeed an effective treatment for the intermittent fever, and thereafter every Procurator who left San Pablo for the Holy City to represent the Peruvian Jesuits at the congress that elected the Jesuit Vicar-General every three years would take with him new supplies of the febrifuge bark. Shortly after Father Bartolomé Tafur, who served as the Peruvian representative at the congress of 1649, arrived in Rome he renewed his acquaintanceship with Cardinal Juan de Lugo, who was then in charge of the apothecary at the Santo Spirito hospital, and was becoming cinchona’s champion in the Holy City. In 1667 Felipe de Paz took with him a trunk filled with the corteza de la calenturas, and in 1669 Nicolás de Miravál arrived with 635 libras of cinchona for distribution in the curia, having left a similar amount in Spain.

  By the second half of the seventeenth century, according to an early map of Lima in the state archive, the citizens of the capital had begun calling the street in front of the Jesuit infirmaries Calle de la cascarilla, Bark Street. Now part of the long, fume-laden Jirón Azangaro, which runs through downtown Lima from the Palacio de la Justicia as far as the Franciscan convent near the river, Calle de la cascarilla would remain up to the start of the republican period in 1825 as a public testimony to San Pablo’s role in distributing cinchona first in Peru and then around the world, and it appears in many of the maps of that time.

  The final decade of the botíca at San Pablo saw Brother Salumbrino’s ambitions come to fruition. The pharmacy itself, where the cinchona bark was weighed out and packed, was beautifully furnished. On its wall hung a large portrait of Salumbrino which his fellow Jesuits had commissioned in 1764 at a cost of 140 pesos, and which bore the legend: ‘Agustino Salumbrino, first founder of this pharmacy of San Pablo’.

  The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with solid oak shelves laden with bottles and flasks. Several tables and chairs were spread around the room, made of wood imported from Chile, and in the centre of the room was a long, wide mahogany counter of a beautiful reddish-brown colour. On top of the counter, in sharp contrast to the dark heavy wood, rested four delicate scales.

  The three black employees who worked in the pharmacy spent their day in the laboratory, a forest of glazed earthenware and shiny instruments, some of lead or bronze, some of pure silver. The laboratory was filled with large jugs, scales, all kinds of stills used for distilling liquids, glass and metal funnels of all shapes and sizes, crystal flasks, retorts and matrasses, gridirons and hand mills, pumping engines and ovens, condensers and cauldrons, handsaws and sieves.

  Brother Salumbrino’s Jesuit masters might have been uncomfortable in that room, with its heavy fumes and thick, unpleasant odours of medicines and chemicals, but they would have been happy to know that in San Pablo’s pharmacy he and his brother pharmacists had the means to preserve and restore the health of the hundreds of priests working in the field. The final inventory of the pharmacy includes more than five hundred medicines, in addition to the books in the library and the vast quantity of stills, bottles and other material that filled the laboratory’s shelves. Of the medicines in the pharmacy, by far the most valuable was una grande tinafa – a great jar – of cinchona bark, which is valued at one hundred pesos.

  Despite the excellence of its pharmacy, the small world of San Pablo was about to be engulfed in political events that were fuelled, as so often happens, by fear and greed. Secret orders had arrived from Madrid: the Society of Jesus was to be expelled from the whole of the Spanish Empire on the orders of King Charles III, who feared its swelling power and longed to own its properties and who finally, after many decades, had chosen to believe the Jesuits’ enemies who had long tried to discredit them in the eyes of Charles and his court.

  At four o’clock in the morning of 9 September 1767 the Viceroy, Don Manuel de Amat, had everything ready to carry out the King’s instructions in Peru. Four hundred soldiers were stationed within the viceregal palace. In the dead of night a number of the most important men in Lima also arrived at the back door of the palace, summoned by a handwritten note from Amat that read, ‘I need you for matters of great service to the King, and I warn you to come so secretly that not even those of your household would realise that you had gone out.’

  Amat personally assigned the troops to go to the various Jesuit houses, and named the civil executioners of the royal decree. Knowing that San Pablo was the heart of all Jesuit institutions in Peru, the Viceroy chose the oidor, a judge in the Audencia of Lima, Don Domingo de Orrantia, and the alcalde – the Mayor – Don José Puente de Ibanez, to lead the soldiers who would occupy the college. Many of those men had studied under Jesuit masters in the cloisters of San Pablo. Many had attended mass in the college chapel, and had even served as altar boys there. Some had Jesuit confessors, and not a few were involved with San Pablo’s many commercial enterprises.

  Of the seven hundred men who left the Plaza Mayor to execute the royal wishes, more than three hundred followed Orrantia, walking in silence for the three blocks that separated the palace from San Pablo. By the time the royal troops with their weapons reached the college it was not yet five o’clock. Inside the Jesuit fathers lay sleeping.

  Don Domingo de Orrantia himself had been a student at San Pablo. He knew the college and its customs well, and had even on occasion helped out in the pharmacy, packing up shipments of cinchona bark to be sent to foreign missions. He banged the large bronze knocker on the heavy wooden door next to the church entrance several times. When he heard steps approaching the door from the inside, he called in a loud voice for a confessor to administer the last rites of the Church to a dying person. It was a request he knew no Catholic priest would refuse.

  The Jesuit doorkeeper swung open the door, only to be pushed aside by guns and bayonets. In a few minutes the college was overrun. Armed soldiers occupied the courtyards and stairways, and the frightened Jesuits were rounded up and herded into the chapel. Many thought they were about to die, and prayers came easily to their lips.

  Don Domingo, standing near the altar, was deeply moved at the sight of his former teachers, and could not bring himself to read the royal decree. He asked the notary Franciso Luque to read it to the fathers instead. But Luque, a former San Pablo schoolboy, broke down and had to be excused. Orrantia had no choice but to read the King’s despotic order to his friends and teachers himself.

  San Pablo, a centre of learning for two centuries, served during September and October 1767 as a temporary prison for nearly two hundred Jesuits. Among them were Salumbrino’s heirs, the four priests who ran the botíca. On 27 October they were transported to Callao, where they were made to board the ship El Peruano. As the vessel drew slowly away from the pier, every man’s eyes clung to the receding coastline.

  The authorities were anxious not to lose the botíca’s services, for it supplied all the Viceroy’s subjects. Its fate was at first entrusted to another religious group, the Fathers of the Oratory of St Philip Neri, or the Oratorians as they were more commonly known. But no one could recapture Agustino Salumbrino’s entrepreneurial spirit. The pharmacy of San Pablo fell into decline, and within three years it had disappeared altogether.

  Its influence, however, did not fade so easily. By the end of the eighteenth century, nearly three hundred ships were arriving in Spanish ports from the Americas every year. About eighty of these came from Peru, not one of which failed to carry a consignment, large or small, of cinchona bark. Official imports of cinchona – those declared to the customs officials at the Spanish port of Cadiz – amounted to an annual total that was valued at more than ten million reales. To put this in context, the value of cascarilla imports in the 1780s was three times that of exotic hardwoods from the Indies, and amounted to nearly 2 per cent of all imports from South America, including gold and silver bullion. By that time the Jesuit initiative in discoveri
ng a treatment for malaria, and sending it halfway round the globe to the world from which they had travelled, had taken on a life of its own. Quinine no longer needed the priests.

  4

  The Quarrel – England

  ‘The Peruvian bark, of which the Jesuites powder is made, is an Excellent thing against all sorts of Agues.’

  WILLIAM SALMON, Synopsis medicinae (1671)

  A thick grey fog, the remnants of winter everywhere in the southern hemisphere, always hangs low in the mornings along the northern Peruvian coast. On 24 August 1748 the sun struggled to find a break in the clouds. Nevertheless, the new frigate the Conde seemed to be gleaming in its berth at the dockside in Callao, north of Lima.

  All over Callao’s port, barefoot porters and barrowboys elbowed and shoved their way up the gangplanks, their faces red with the effort of carrying cargo of a hundredweight or more on their shoulders to be stowed in the hold of the ship. The Conde had been built in the yard at Guayaquil, a little further up the coast, and had been launched into the Pacific just days before. One hundred and twenty-four merchants had clubbed together to charter her for this, her maiden voyage. The master of the Conde, Don Juan Basilio de Molina, was well known to them as an experienced sailor who ran a tight ship and knew how to care for his vessel during the heavy storms it would encounter on its seven-month journey through the Mar del Sur, the unpredictable and vicious southern ocean around Cape Horn, on its way to the port of Cadiz in Spain. When, a few weeks earlier, a small contingent of the merchants had travelled to Guayaquil to make their final inspection of the vessel before signing the charter contract, they approved of her thick new sails, her heavy draught and her ample hold with room for all the merchandise they wanted to send to markets in Spain and the rest of Europe.